One evening not long ago, some academic friends came to my house, and as we talked
and drank we looked at a television showing of Tod Browning's 1931 version of
Dracula. Dwight Frye's appearance on the screen had us suddenly squealing and
shrieking, and it was obvious that old vampire movies were part of our common
experience. We talked about the famous ones, Murnau's Nosferatu and Dreyer's
Vampyr, and we began to get fairly involved in the lore of the genre—the
strategy of the bite, the special earth for the coffins, the stake through the
heart versus the rays of the sun as disposal methods, the cross as vampire
repellent, et al. We had begun to surprise each other by the affectionate,
nostalgic tone of our mock erudition when the youngest person present, an
instructor in English, said, in clear, firm tone, "The Beast with Five Fingers
is the greatest horror picture I've ever seen." Stunned that so bright a young
man could display such shocking taste, preferring a Warner, Brothers forties
mediocrity to the classics, I gasped, "But why?" And he answered, "Because it's
completely irrational. It doesn't make any sense, and that's the true
terror."

Upset by his neat little declaration—existentialism in a nutshell—by the calm
matter-of-factness of it, and by the way the others seemed to take it for
granted, I wanted to pursue the subject. But O. Henry's remark "Conversation in
Texas is seldom continuous" applies to California, too. Dracula had ended, and
the conversation shifted to other, more "serious" subjects.

But his attitude, which had never occurred to me, helped explain some of my
recent moviegoing experiences. I don't mean that I agree that The Beast with Five
Fingers is a great horror film, but that his enthusiasm for the horror that
cannot be rationalized by the mythology and rules of the horror game related to
audience reactions that had been puzzling me.

Last year I had gone to see a famous French film, Georges Franju's Eyes
Without a Face, which had arrived in San Francisco in a dubbed version called
The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus and was playing on a double-horror bill in a
huge Market Street theater. It was Saturday night and the theater, which holds
2646, was so crowded I had trouble finding a seat.

Even dubbed, Eyes Without a Face, which Franju called a "poetic fantasy," is
austere and elegant: the exquisite photography is by the great Shuftan, the
music by Maurice Jarre, the superb gowns by Givenchy. It's a symbolist attack
on science and the ethics of medicine, and though I thought this attack as
simpleminded in its way as the usual young poet's denunciation of war or
commerce, it is in some peculiar way a classic of horror.

Pierre Brasseur, as a doctor, experiments systematically, removing the faces of
beautiful young kidnaped women, trying to graft them onto the ruined head of
his daughter. He keeps failing, the girls are destroyed and yet he persists—in
some terrible parody of the scientific method. In the end, the daughter—still
only eyes without a face—liberates the dogs on which he also experiments and
they tear off his head.

It's both bizarrely sophisticated (with Alida Valli as his mistress doing the
kidnaping in a black leather coat, recalling the death images from Cocteau's
Orpheus) and absurdly naive. Franju's style is almost as purified as Robert
Bresson's, and although I dislike the mixture of austerity and mysticism with
blood and gore, it produced its effect—a vague, floating, almost lyric sense
of horror, an almost abstract atmosphere, impersonal and humorless. It has
nothing like the fun of a good old horror satire like The Bride of Frankenstein
with Elsa Lanchester's hair curling electrically instead of just frizzing as
usual, and Ernest Thesiger toying with mandrake roots and tiny ladies and
gentlemen in glass jars. It's a horror film that takes itself very seriously,
and even though I thought its intellectual pretensions silly, I couldn't shake
off the exquisite, dread images.

But the audience seemed to be reacting to a different movie. They were so
noisy the dialogue was inaudible; they talked until the screen gave promise of
bloody ghastliness. Then the chatter subsided to rise again in noisy approval
of the gory scenes. When a girl in the film seemed about to be mutilated, a
young man behind me jumped up and down and shouted encouragement. "Somebody's
going to get it," he sang out gleefully. The audience, which was, I'd judge,
predominantly between fifteen and twenty-five, and at least a third feminine,
was as pleased and excited by the most revolting, obsessive images as that
older, mostly male audience is when the nudes appear in The Immoral Mr. Teas or
Not Tonight, Henry. They'd gotten what they came for: they hadn't been cheated.
But nobody seemed to care what the movie was about or be interested in the
logic of the plot—the reasons for the gore.

And audiences have seemed indifferent to incomprehensible sections in big
expensive pictures. For example, how is it that the immense audience for The
Bridge on the River Kwai, after all those hours of watching a story unfold,
didn't express discomfort or outrage or even plain curiosity about what exactly
happened at the end—which through bad direction or perhaps sloppy editing went
by too fast to be sorted out and understood. Was it possible that audiences no
longer cared if a film was so untidily put together that information crucial to
the plot or characterizations was obscure or omitted altogether? What Ever
Happened to Baby Jane? was such a mess that Time, after calling it "the year's
scariest, funniest and most sophisticated thriller," got the plot garbled.

In recent years, largely because of the uncertainty of producers about what
will draw, films in production may shift from one script to another, or may be
finally cut so that key sequences are omitted. And the oddity is that it
doesn't seem to matter to the audience. I couldn't tell what was going on in
parts of 55 Days at Peking. I was flabbergasted when Cleopatra, with no hint or
preparation, suddenly demonstrated clairvoyant powers, only to dispense with
them as quickly as she had acquired them. The audience for The Cardinal can
have little way of knowing whose baby the priest's sister is having, or of
understanding how she can be in labor for days, screaming in a rooming house,
without anybody hearing her. They might also be puzzled about how the priest's
argument against her marriage, which they have been told is the only Catholic
position, can, after it leads to her downfall and death, be casually dismissed
as an error.

It would be easy to conclude that people go to see a "show" and just don't
worry if it all hangs together so long as they've got something to look at. But
I think it's more complicated than that: audiences used to have an almost
rational passion for getting the story straight. They might prefer bad movies
to good ones, and the Variety list of "all-time top grossers" (such as The
Greatest Show on Earth and Going My Way) indicates that they did, but although
the movies might be banal or vulgar, they were rarely incoherent. A movie had
to tell some kind of story that held together: a plot had to parse. Some of the
appreciation for the cleverness of, say, Hitchcock's early thrillers was that
they distracted you from the loopholes, so that, afterwards, you could enjoy
thinking over how you'd been tricked and teased. Perhaps now "stories" have
become too sane, too explicable, too commonplace for the large audiences who
want sensations and regard the explanatory connections as mere "filler"—the
kind of stuff you sit through or talk through between jolts.

It's possible that television viewing, with all its breaks and cuts, and the
inattention, except for action, and spinning the dial to find some action, is
partly responsible for destruction of the narrative sense—that delight in
following a story through its complications to its conclusion, which is perhaps
a child's first conscious artistic pleasure. The old staples of
entertainment—inoffensive genres like the adventure story or the musical or
the ghost story or the detective story—are no longer commercially safe for
moviemakers, and it may be that audiences don't have much more than a TV span
of attention left: they want to be turned on and they spend most of their time
turning off. Something similar and related may be happening in reading tastes
and habits: teen-agers that I meet have often read Salinger and some Orwell and
Lord of the Flies and some Joyce Cary and sometimes even Dostoyevsky, but they
are not interested in the "classic" English novels of Scott or Dickens, and
what is more to the point, they don't read the Sherlock Holmes stories or even
the modern detective fiction that in the thirties and forties was an accepted
part of the shared experience of adolescents. Whatever the reasons—and they
must be more than TV, they must have to do with modern life and the sense of
urgency it produces—audiences can no longer be depended on to respond to
conventional forms.

Perhaps they want much more from entertainment than the civilized, but limited
rational pleasures of genre pieces. More likely, and the box-office returns
support this, they want something different. Audiences that enjoy the shocks
and falsifications, the brutal series of titillations of a Mondo Cane, one
thrill after another, don't care any longer about the conventions of the past,
and are too restless and apathetic to pay attention to motivations and
complications, cause and effect. They want less effort, more sensations, more
knobs to turn.

A decade ago, The Haunting, an efficient, professional and to all appearances
"commercial" genre piece, might have made money. By the end of 1963, its
grosses in the United States and Canada, according to Variety, were $700,000.
This may be compared with $9,250,000 for Irma La Douce, $4,600,000 for The
Birds, $3,900,000 for 55 Days at Peking—all three, I think, much less
enjoyable movies, or to be more exact, terrible movies, and in varying degrees
pointless and incomprehensible. A detective genre piece, The List of Adrian
Messenger, also incomparably better than the three films cited, and with a
tricky "star" selling campaign, grossed only $1,500,000. It's easy to imagine
that Robert Wise, after the energetic excesses of West Side Story, turned to
The Haunting for a safe, sane respite, and that John Huston, after wrestling
with Freud, turned to an intriguing detective story like Adrian Messenger for a
lucrative, old-fashioned holiday. But what used to be safe seems now to be
folly. How can audiences preoccupied with identity problems of their own worry
about a case of whodunit and why and how? Following clues may be too much of an
effort for those who, in the current teen-age phrase, "couldn't care less."
They want shock treatment, not diversion, and it takes more than ghosts to
frighten them.

The Haunting is set in that pleasantly familiar "old dark house" that is itself
an evil presence, and is usually inhabited by ghosts or evil people. In our
childhood imaginings, the unknowable things that have happened in old houses,
and the whispers that someone may have died in them, make them mysterious,
"dirty"; only the new house that has known no life or death is safe and clean.
But so many stories have used the sinister dark house
from-which-no-one-can-escape and its murky gardens for our ritual entertainment
that we learn to experience the terrors as pleasurable excitations and
reassuring reminders of how frightened we used to be before we learned our way
around. In film, as in story, the ambiance is fear; the film specialty is
gathering a group who are trapped and helpless. (Although the women are more
easily frightened, the men are also powerless. Their superior strength doesn't
count for much against unseen menaces: this may explain why the genre was often
used for a male comedian—like Bob Hope in The Ghost Breakers. Russ Tamblyn
serves a similar but feeble cowardly-comic function in The Haunting.) The
action is confined to the house and grounds (the maze); the town is usually far
away, just far enough away so that "nobody will hear you if you scream."

In recent years film festivals and art houses have featured a peculiar variant
of the trapped-in-the-old-dark-house genre (Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel is
the classic new example), but the characters, or rather figures, are the undead
or zombies of the vampire movies. "We live as in coffins frozen side by side in
a garden"—Last Year at Marienbad. "I'm dead"—the heroine of II Mare. "They're
all dead in there"—the hostess describing the party of La Notte. Their vital
juices have been sucked away, but they don't have the revealing marks on the
throat. We get the message: alienation drains the soul without leaving any
marks. Or, as Bergman says of his trilogy, "Most of the people in these three
films are dead, completely dead. They don't know how to love or to feel any
emotions. They are lost because they can't reach anyone outside of themselves."
This "art" variant is a message movie about failure of communication and lack
of love and spiritual emptiness and all the rest of that. It's the closest
thing we've got to a new genre but it has some peculiarities. The old dark
house was simply there, but these symbolic decadent or sterile surroundings are
supposed to reflect the walking death of those within the maze. The characters
in the old dark house tried to solve the riddle of their imprisonment and tried
to escape; even in No Exit the drama was in why the characters were there, but
in the new hotel-in-hell movies the characters don't even want to get out of
the maze—nor one surmises do the directors, despite their moralizing. And
audiences apparently respond to these films as modern and relevant just because
of this paralysis and inaction and minimal story line. If in the group at the
older dark house, someone was not who we thought he was, in the new dull party
gatherings, it doesn't matter who anybody is (which is a new horror).

Although The Haunting is moderately elegant and literate and expensive, and the
director gussies things up with a Marienbadish piece of statuary that may or
may not be the key to something or other, it's basically a traditional ghost
story. There is the dedicated scientist who wants to contribute to science in
some socially unacceptable or scientifically reproachable area—in this case to
prove the supernatural powers of the house. (The scientist is, somewhat
inexplicably, an anthropologist; perhaps Margaret Mead has set the precedent
for anthropologists to dabble in and babble on anything—so that the modern
concept of the anthropologist is like the old concept of the philosopher or,
for that matter, the scientist.) And, in the expository style traditional for
the genre, he explains the lore and jargon of psychic research, meticulously
separating out ghost from poltergeist and so on. And of course the scientist,
in the great tradition of Frankenstein, must have the abnormal or mad
assistant: the role that would once have belonged to Dwight Frye is here
modernized and becomes the Greenwich Village lesbian, Claire Bloom. And there
is the scientist's distraught wife who fears that her husband's brilliant
career will be ruined, and so on. The chaste heroine, Julie Harris (like an
updated Helen Chandler, Dracula's anemic victim), is the movies' post-Freudian
concept of the virgin: repressed, hysterical, insane—the source of evil.

It wasn't a great movie but I certainly wouldn't have thought that it could
offend anyone. Yet part of the audience at The Haunting wasn't merely bored, it
was hostile—as if the movie, by assuming interests they didn't have, made them
feel resentful or inferior. I've never felt this kind of audience hostility
toward crude, bad movies. People are relaxed and tolerant about ghoulish
quickies, grotesque shockers dubbed from Japan, and chopped-up Italian
spectacles that scramble mythologies and pile on actions, one stupidity after
another. Perhaps they prefer incoherent, meaningless movies because they are
not required to remember or connect. They can feel superior, contemptuous—as
they do toward television advertising. Even when it's a virtuoso triumph, the
audience is contemptuous toward advertising, because, after all, they see
through it—they know somebody is trying to sell something. And because, like a
cheap movie obviously made to pry money out of them, that is all advertising
means, it's OK. But the few, scattered people at The Haunting were restless and
talkative, the couple sitting near me arguing—the man threatening to leave,
the woman assuring him that something would happen. In their terms, they were
cheated: nothing happened. And, of course, they missed what was happening all
along, perhaps because of nervous impatience or a primitive notion that the
real things are physical, perhaps because people take from art and from popular
entertainment only what they want; and if they are indifferent to story and
motive and blank out on the connections, then a movie without physical action
or crass jokes or built-in sentimental responses has nothing for them. I am
afraid that the young instructor in English spoke for his times, that there is
no terror for modern audiences if a story is carefully worked out and follows a
tradition, even though the tradition was developed and perfected precisely to
frighten entertainingly.

No wonder that studios and producers are unsure what to do next, scan
best-seller lists for trends, consult audience-testing polls, anxiously chop
out what a preview audience doesn't like. The New York Times chides the
representatives of some seven companies who didn't want to invest in What Ever
Happened to Baby Jane? but how could businessmen, brought up to respect logic
and a good commercial script, possibly guess that this confused mixture of low
camp and Grand Guignol would delight the public?

And if I may return for a moment to that producer whom I left sunning himself
at the side of the pool—"Did you know that Irma La Douce is already the
highest-grossing comedy in film history?" he asked me at one point, not in the
droning voice of the civic-minded man discussing the cultural development of
the community, but in the voice of someone who's really involved in what he's
saying; "Yes," I said, "but is it even a comedy? It's a monstrous mutation."
The producer shrugged his dark round shoulders helplessly: "Who knows what's a
comedy any more?"

It is not just general audiences out for an evening's entertainment who seem to
have lost the narrative sense, or become indifferent to narrative. What I think
are processes of structural disintegration are at work in all types of movies,
and though it's obvious that many of the old forms were dead and had to be
broken through, it's rather scary to see what's happening—and not just at the
big picture-palaces. Art-house films are even more confusing. Why, at the end
of Godard's My Life to Live, is the heroine shot, rather than the pimp that the
rival gang is presumably gunning for? Is she just a victim of bad marksmanship?
If we express perplexity, we are likely to be told that we are missing the
existentialist point: it's simply fate, she had to die. But a cross-eyed fate?
And why is there so little questioning of the organization of My Name Is Ivan
with its lyric interludes and patriotic sections so ill assembled that one
might think the projectionist had scrambled the reels? (They often do at art
houses, and it would seem that the more sophisticated the audience, the less
likely that the error will be discovered. When I pointed out to a theater
manager that the women in Brink of Life were waiting for their babies after
they had miscarried, he told me that he had been playing the film for two weeks
and I was his first patron who wasn't familiar with Bergman's methods.)

The art-house audience accepts lack of clarity as complexity, accepts
clumsiness and confusion as "ambiguity" and as style. Perhaps even without the
support of critics, they would accept incoherence just as the larger audience
does: they may feel that movies as incomprehensible as Viridiana are more
relevant to their experience, more true to their own feelings about life, and
more satisfying and complex than works they can understand.

I trust I won't be mistaken for the sort of boob who attacks ambiguity or
complexity. I am interested in the change from the period when the meaning of
art and form in art was in making complex experience simple and lucid, as is
still the case in Knife in the Water or Bandits of Orgosolo, to the current
acceptance of art as technique, the technique which in a movie like This
Sporting Life makes a simple, though psychologically confused, story look
complex, and modern because inexplicable.

It has become easy—especially for those who consider "time" a problem and a
great theme—to believe that fast editing, out of normal sequence, which makes
it difficult, or impossible, for the audience to know if any action is taking
place, is somehow more "cinematic" than a consecutively told story. For a half
century movies have, when necessary, shifted action in time and place and the
directors generally didn't think it necessary to slap us in the face with each
cut or to call out, "Look what I can do!" Yet people who should know better
will tell you how "cinematic" The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner or
This Sporting Life is—as if fiddling with the time sequence was good in
itself—proof that the "medium" is really being used. Perhaps, after a few
decades of indoctrination in high art, they are convinced that a movie is
cinematic when they don't understand what's going on. This Sporting Life, which
Derek Hill, among others, has called the best feature ever made in England,
isn't gracefully fragmented, it's smashed. The chunks are so heavy and
humorless and, in an odd way, disturbing, that we can tell the film is meant to
be bold, powerful, tragic.

There's a woman writer I'd be tempted to call a three-time loser: she's
Catholic, Communist, and lesbian; but she comes on more like a triple threat.
She's in with so many groups that her books are rarely panned. I thought of her
when I read the reviews of This Sporting Life: this film has it made in so many
ways, it carries an identity card with all the outsiders. The hero is
"bewildered," the heroine "bruised" and "afraid of life," the brutal rugby
games are possibly a "microcosm of a corrupt society," and the film murkily
suggests all sorts of passion and protest, like a group of demonstrators
singing "We Shall Overcome" and leaving it to you to fill in your own set of
injustices. For Show magazine, "The football scenes bear the aspect of a savage
rite, with the spectators as participants hungry for sacrifice. The love story
. . . is simply another kind of scrimmage, a battle between two people who
cannot communicate . . ." For the New York Times, the film "translates the
confusions and unrequited longings of the angry young men and women of our time
into memorable universal truths." (I wish the reviewer would spell out one or
two of them for us.) The Times has an unusual interpretation of the love story:
"The woman . . . only succumbs to him physically and the real roots he seeks
are unattainable." This reminds me of my confusion as a schoolgirl when a jazz
musician who had been introduced to me during the break called out "Dig you
later" as he went back to the stand.

In the Observer, Penelope Gilliatt offers extraordinary praise: "This Sporting
Life is a stupendous film. It has a blow like a fist. I've never seen an
English picture that gave such expression to the violence and the capacity for
pain that there is in the English character. It is there in Shakespeare, in
Marlowe, in Lawrence and Orwell and Hogarth, but not in our cinema like this
before. This Sporting Life is hard to write about because everything important
about it is really subverbal." But then so are trees and animals and cities.
Isn't it precisely the artist's task to give form to his experience and the
critic's task to verbalize on how this has been accomplished? She goes on to
write of the hero, "The events almost seem to be happening to him in the dark.
Half of them are told while he is under dentist's gas, in flashback, which is a
clumsy device if one is telling a story but the natural method if one is
searching around a character." English dental hygiene is notorious; still,
isn't telling a story, with or without gas and flashbacks, a pretty good
"natural" method of searching around a characters? But something more seems to
be involved: "The black subjective spirit of the film is overpowering. It
floods the sound track, which often has a peculiar resonance as though it were
happening inside one's own head." Sort of a sunken cathedral effect? The bells
are clanging in the reviewers' heads, but what's happening on the screen?

In one way or another, almost all the enthusiasts for a film like this one will
tell you that it doesn't matter, that however you interpret the film, you will
be right (though this does not prevent some of them from working out elaborate
interpretations of Marienbad or The Eclipse or Viridiana). Walter Lassally says
that "Antonioni's oblique atmospheric statements and Bunuel's symbolism, for
example, cannot be analyzed in terms of good or bad . . . for they contain, in
addition to any obvious meanings, everything that the viewer may read into
them." Surely he can read the most onto a blank screen?

There's not much to be said for this theory except that it's mighty democratic.
Rather pathetically, those who accept this Rorschach-blot approach to movies
are hesitant and uneasy about offering reactions. They should be reassured by
the belief that whatever they say is right, but as it refers not to the film
but to them (turning criticism into autobiography) they are afraid of
self-exposure. I don't think they really believe the theory—it's a sort of
temporary public convenience station. More and more people come out of a movie
and can't tell you what they've seen, or even whether they liked it.

An author like David Storey may stun them with information like "[This Sporting
Life] works purely in terms of feeling. Only frivolous judgments can be made
about it in conventional terms of style." Has he discovered a new method of
conveying feeling without style? Or has he simply found the arrogance to
frustrate normal responses? No one wants to have his capacity for feeling
questioned, and if a viewer tries to play it cool, and discuss This Sporting
Life in terms of corrupt professional football, he still won't score on that
muddy field: there are no goalposts. Lindsay Anderson, who directed, says,
"This Sporting Life is not a film about sport. In fact, I wouldn't really call
it a story picture at all.... We have tried to make a tragedy . . . we were
making a film about something unique." A tragedy without a story is unique all
right: a disaster.

In movies, as in other art forms, if you are interested only in technique or if
you reject technique, the result is just about the same: if you have nothing to
express it is very much like thinking you have so much to express that you
don't know how to say it. Something related to absorption in technique is
involved in the enthusiasm of young people for what is called "the New American
Cinema," though these films are often made by those who reject craftsmanship as
well as meaning. They tend to equate technique with science and those who
produced the Bomb. This approach, which is a little like the attack on
scientific method in Eyes Without a Face, is used to explain why they must make
movies without taking time to learn how. They're in a hurry, and anyway,
technique might corrupt them.

The spokesmen for this cinema attack rationality as if it were the enemy of art
("as/ the heavy Boots of Soldiers and Intellect/ march across the/ flowerfields
of subconscious" and so forth by Jonas Mekas). They have composed a rather
strange amalgam in which reason = lack of feeling and imagination = hostility
to art = science = the enemy = Nazis and police = the Bomb. Somewhere along the
line, criticism is also turned into an enemy of art. The group produces a kind
of euphoric publicity which is published in place of criticism, but soon it may
have semi-intellectually respectable critics. In the Nation of April 13, 1964,
Susan Sontag published an extraordinary essay on Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures
called "A Feast for Open Eyes" in which she enunciates a new critical
principle: "Thus Smith's crude technique serves, beautifully, the sensibility
embodied in Flaming Creatures—a sensibility based on indiscriminateness,
without ideas, beyond negation." I think in treating indiscriminateness as a
value, she has become a real swinger. Of course we can reply that if anything
goes, nothing happens, nothing works. But this is becoming irrelevant. In Los
Angeles, among the independent film makers at their midnight screenings I was
told that I belonged to the older generation, that Agee-alcohol generation they
called it, who could not respond to the new films because I didn't take pot or
LSD and so couldn't learn just to accept everything. This narcotic approach of
torpid acceptance, which is much like the lethargy of the undead in those
failure-of-communication movies, may explain why those films have seemed so
"true" to some people (and why the directors' moralistic messages sound so
false). This attitude of rejecting critical standards has the dubious advantage
of accepting everyone who says he is an artist as an artist and conferring on
all his "noncommercial" productions the status of art. Miss Sontag is on to
something and if she stays on and rides it like Slim Pickens, it's the end of
criticism—at the very least.

It's ten years since Dylan Thomas answered Maya Deren's call for a new poetry
of film with "I'm not at all sure that I want such a thing, myself, as a poetic
film. I think films fine as they are, if only they were better . . . I like
stories, you know —I like to see something going on." Movies have changed in
these ten years, disastrously in the last few years; they have become
"cinema."

At the art-house level, critics and audiences haven't yet discovered the beauty
of indiscriminateness, but there's a lot of talk about "purely visual
content"—which might be called the principle of ineffability. Time calls
Resnais's Muriel "another absorbing exercise in style." Dwight Macdonald calls
Marienbad "'pure' cinema, a succession of images enjoyable in themselves." And
Richard Roud, who was responsible (and thus guilty) for the film selection at
the New York Film Festivals, goes all the way: films like La Notte, he says,
provide an "experience in pure form."

Once matters reach this plane, it begins to seem almost unclean to raise issues
about meaning and content and character, or to question the relevance of a
sequence, the quality of a performance. Someone is sure to sneer, "Are you
looking for a paraphrasable content? A film, like a poem, is." Or smile
pityingly and remind you that Patroni Griffi had originally intended to call II
Mare "Landscape with Figures"; doesn't that tell you how you should look at it?
It does indeed, and it's not my idea of a good time. After a few dismal
experiences we discover that when we are told to admire a film for its pure
form or its structure, it is going to exhibit irritating, confusing, and
ostentatious technique, which will, infuriatingly, be all we can discover in
it. And if we should mention that we enjoy the dramatic and narrative elements
in movies, we are almost certain to be subjected to the contemptuous remark,
"Why does cinema have to mean something? Do you expect a work by Bach to
mean something?"

The only way to answer this is by some embarrassingly basic analysis, pointing
out that words, unlike tones, refer to something and that movie images are
rarely abstract or geometric designs, and that when they include people and
places and actions, they have implications, associations. Robbe-Grillet, the
scenarist of Marienbad, may say that the film is a pure construction, an object
without reference to anything outside itself, and that the existence of the two
characters begins when the film begins and ends ninety-three minutes later,
but, of course, we are not born when we go in to see a movie—though we may
want to die by the time we leave. And we can't even leave Marienbad behind
because, although it isn't particularly memorable (it isn't even particularly
offensive), a kind of creeping Marienbadism is the new aesthetics of "poetic"
cinema. This can only sound like pedantry to those interested in "pure" art who
tend to consider analysis as an enemy, anyway (though, many of them are in it).
The very same people who say that a movie shouldn't mean anything, that art is
beyond meaning, also say that it must be seen over and over again because it
reveals more meaning with subsequent viewings. And although the structure of
many of the new films is somehow supposed to be the art, we are frowned upon if
we question the organization of the material. There is nothing, finally, that
we are allowed to question or criticize. We are supposed only to interpret—and
that as we wish.

The leaders of this new left-wing formalism are Resnais, who gives us his
vision of a bomb-shattered, fragmented universe, and Antonioni, the master
practitioner of the fallacy of expressive form, who sets out to demonstrate
that boredom (and its accompanying eroticism) is the sickness of our time (but
doesn't explain how it helps to add to it). If their characters have a curious
way of using their sophisticated vacuity as a come-on, are they not in their
creators' image? They make assignations (as in The Eclipse), but nobody
comes.

The movie houses may soon look as desolate as II Mare—set in Capri in winter.
I've never seen so many people sleeping through movies as at Lincoln Center: no
wonder there is talk of "cinema" achieving the social status of opera. A few
more seasons of such art and it will be evidence of your interest in culture
and your sense of civic responsibility if you go to the movies.

The "techniques" of such films are so apparent, so obtrusive, that they may
easily be assumed to be "advanced," "modern," "new." It's perfectly true you
don't come out of an older movie like Renoir's La Grande Illusion, or
Flaherty's Man of Aran, or Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night saying, "What
technique!" Nor do you come out of a concert by Serkin exclaiming about his
technique—you're thinking of the music. But those who adore Jose Iturbi always
say, "What technique!"; what else is there to respond to? And the
comment—which means how fast he can play or how ostentatiously—is not so very
far from the admiration for Antonioni or Torre Nilsson or Bresson's Trial of
Joan of Arc (though they are generally admired for how slow they can play).

My attitude to what is happening to movies is more than a little ambivalent. I
don't think that my own preferences or the preferences of others for coherence
and wit and feeling are going to make much difference. Movies are going to
pieces; they're disintegrating, and the something called cinema is not movies
raised to an art but rather movies diminished, movies that look "artistic."
Movies are being stripped of all the "nonessentials"—that is to say, faces,
actions, details, stories, places—everything that makes them entertaining and
joyful. They are even being stripped of the essentials—light (The Eclipse),
sound (The Silence), and movement in some of the New American Cinema films
(there is sure to be one called Stasis). It's obvious that the most talented
film artists and the ones most responsive to our time and the attitudes of
Camus and Sartre are the ones moving in this direction. The others, those
trying to observe the older conventions, are usually (though not always) banal,
trivial, ludicrously commercial, and out of touch, somehow. It is the highest
talents, the most dedicated, who are driven to the dead end of "pure"
cinema—just as our painters are driven to obliterate the image, and a
dramatist like Beckett to reduce words to sounds.

Cinema, I suspect, is going to become so rarefied, so private in meaning, and
so lacking in audience appeal that in a few years the foundations will be
desperately and hopelessly trying to bring it back to life, as they are now
doing with theater. The parallel course is, already, depressingly apparent.
Clancy Sigal's (admiring) account of Beckett's Endgame might have been written
of Bergman's The Silence:

Endgame's two main characters . . . occupy a claustrophobic space and a deeply
ambiguous relationship.... Outside, the world is dead of some great
catastrophe.... The action of the play mainly comprises anxious bickering
between the too principal characters. Eventually, Clov dresses for the road to
leave Hamm, and Hamm prepares for death, though we do not see the moment of
parting . . . none of the actors is quite sure what the play is about, Beckett
affects complete ignorance of the larger implications. "I only know what's on
the page," he says with a friendly gesture.

Is Beckett leading the way or is it all in the air? His direction that the
words of Play should be spoken so fast that they can't be understood is
paralleled by Resnais's editing of Muriel so fast that you can't keep track of
what's going on. Penelope Gilliatt writes, "You may have to go to the film at
least twice, as I did, before the warmth of it seeps through . . ."; Beckett
has already anticipated the problem and provided the answer with the stage
direction, "Repeat play exactly."

When movies, the only art which everyone felt free to enjoy and have opinions
about, lose their connection with song and dance, drama, and the novel, when
they become cinema, which people fear to criticize just as they fear to say
what they think of a new piece of music or a new poem or painting, they will
become another object of academic study and "appreciation," and will soon be an
object of excitement only to practitioners of the "art." Although L'Avventura
is a great film, had I been present at Cannes in 1960, where Antonioni
distributed his explanatory statement, beginning, "There exists in the world
today a very serious break between science on the one hand . . . ," I might
easily have joined in the hisses, which he didn't really deserve until the
following year, when La Notte revealed that he'd begun to believe his own
explanations—thus making liars of us all.

When we see Dwight Macdonald's cultural solution applied to film, when we see
the prospect that movies will become a product for "Masscult" consumption,
while the "few who care" will have their High Culture cinema, who wants to take
the high road? There is more energy, more originality, more excitement, more
art in American kitsch like Gunga Din, Easy Living, the Rogers and Astaire
pictures like Swingtime and Top Hat, in Strangers on a Train, His Girl Friday,
The Crimson Pirate, Citizen Kane, The Lady Eve, To Have and Have Not, The
African Queen, Singin' in the Rain, Sweet Smell of Success, or more recently,
The Hustler, Lolita, The Manchurian Candidate, Hud, Charade, than in the
presumed "High Culture" of Hiroshima Mon Amour, Marienbad, La Notte, The
Eclipse, and the Torre Nilsson pictures. As Nabokov remarked, "Nothing is more
exhilarating than Philistine vulgarity."

Regrettably, one of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the
superior tastes of those who put him down. Macdonald believes that "a work of
High Culture, however inept, is an expression of feelings, ideas, tastes,
visions that are idiosyncratic and the audience similarly responds to them as
individuals." No. The "pure" cinema enthusiast who doesn't react to a film but
feels he should, and so goes back to it over and over, is not responding as an
individual but as a compulsive good pupil determined to appreciate what his
cultural superiors say is "art." Movies are on their way into academia when
they're turned into a matter of duty: a mistake in judgment isn't fatal, but
too much anxiety about judgment is. In this country, respect for High Culture
is becoming a ritual.

If debased art is kitsch, perhaps kitsch may be redeemed by honest vulgarity,
may become art. Our best work transforms kitsch, makes art out of it; that is
the peculiar greatness and strength of American movies, as Godard in Breathless
and Truffaut in Shoot the Piano Player recognize. Huston's The Maltese Falcon
is a classic example. Our first and greatest film artist D. W. Griffith was a
master of kitsch: the sentiment and melodrama in his films are much more
integral to their greatness than the critics who lament Griffith's lack of mind
( ! ) perceive.

The movies are still where it happens, not for much longer perhaps, but the
movies are still the art form that uses the material of our lives and the art
form that we use. I am not suggesting that we want to see new and bigger
remakes of the tired old standbys of the film repertory: who wants to see the
new Cimarron, another Quo Vadis? And meanings don't have to be spread out for
us like a free-lunch counter. There are movies that are great experiences like
Long Day's Journey into Night, and just a few years back there were movies
which told good stories—movies like The Treasure of Sierra Madre, From Here to
Eternity, The Nun's Story.

People go to the movies for the various ways they express the experiences of
our lives, and as a means of avoiding and postponing the pressures we feel.
This latter function of art—generally referred to disparagingly as
escapism—may also be considered as refreshment, and in terms of modern big
city life and small town boredom, it may be a major factor in keeping us
sane.

In the last few years there has appeared a new kind of filmgoer: he isn't
interested in movies but in cinema. A great many of the film makers are in this
group: they've never gone to movies much and they don't care about them.
They're interested in what they can do in the medium, not in what has been
done. This is, of course, their privilege, though I would suggest that it may
explain why they have such limited approaches to film. I'm more puzzled by the
large numbers of those who are looking for importance in cinema. For example, a
doctor friend called me after he'd seen The Pink Panther to tell me I needn't
"bother" with that one, it was just slapstick. When I told him I'd already seen
it and had a good time at it, he was irritated; he informed me that a movie
should be more than a waste of time, it should be an exercise of taste that
will enrich your life. Those looking for importance are too often contemptuous
of the crude vitality of American films, though this crudity is not always
offensive, and may represent the only way that energy and talent and
inventiveness can find an outlet, can break through the planned standardization
of mass entertainment. It has become a mark of culture to revere the old
slapstick (the Mack Sennett two-reelers and early Chaplins that aren't really
as great as all that) and put down the new. But in a movie as shopworn as Who's
Been Sleeping in My Bed? there is, near the end, an almost inspired satirical
striptease by Carol Burnett. The Nutty Professor is too long and repetitive,
but Jerry Lewis has some scenes that hold their own with the silent classics. I
enjoyed The Prize, which opens badly but then becomes a lively, blatant
entertainment; but there's no point in recommending it to someone who wants his
life enriched. I couldn't persuade friends to go see Charade, which although no
more than a charming confectionery trifle was, I think, probably the best
American film of last year—as artificial and enjoyable in its way as The Big
Sleep. The word had got around that it isn't important, that it isn't serious,
that it doesn't do anything for you.

Our academic bureaucracy needs something alive to nourish it and movies still
have a little blood which the academics can drain away. In the West several of
the academic people I know who have least understanding of movies were suddenly
interested by Laurence Alloway's piece called "Critics in the Dark" in
Encounter. By suggesting that movie criticism had never gotten into the right
hands—i.e., theirs, and by indicating projects, and by publishing in the
prestigious Encounter, Alloway indicated large vistas of respectability for
future film critics. Perhaps also they were drawn to his condescending approach
to movies as a pop art. Many academics have always been puzzled that Agee could
care so much about movies. Alloway, by taking the position that Agee's caring
was a maladjustment, re-established their safe, serene worlds in which if a man
gets excited about an idea or an issue, they know there's something the matter
with him. It's not much consolation, but I think the cinema the academics will
be working over will be the cinema they deserve.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

Even when they’re adopted, the children of the wealthy grow up to be just as well-off as their parents.

Lately, it seems that every new study about social mobility further corrodes the story Americans tell themselves about meritocracy; each one provides more evidence that comfortable lives are reserved for the winners of what sociologists call the birth lottery. But, recently, there have been suggestions that the birth lottery’s outcomes can be manipulated even after the fluttering ping-pong balls of inequality have been drawn.

What appears to matter—a lot—is environment, and that’s something that can be controlled. For example, one study out of Harvard found that moving poor families into better neighborhoods greatly increased the chances that children would escape poverty when they grew up.

While it’s well documentedthat the children of the wealthy tend to grow up to be wealthy, researchers are still at work on how and why that happens. Perhaps they grow up to be rich because they genetically inherit certain skills and preferences, such as a tendency to tuck away money into savings. Or perhaps it’s mostly because wealthier parents invest more in their children’s education and help them get well-paid jobs. Is it more nature, or more nurture?

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.